Sunday Sampler: Shutting Down Shutdowns Edition (No, Not THAT Shutdown)

Sunday Samplers are a “lightning round” of different subjects, none of which really warrant a full post, that have popped into my head over the course of the past week. They may or may not be regular weekly posts.

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Recently, a video from a creator that I normally like came out talking about how supposedly “cringe” culture is an absence of empathy. It was… disappointing. Not because I disagree with the central premise but because it was reductive. It also skirted around what I think the real issue is (namely, that TikTok is actively making everything about being alive worse & no one seems interested in acknowledging that), while indulging in some things that always rub me the wrong way, from slinging around psych terms like corporate buzzwords to even dropping an “it’s not that deep” moment about “that person in class who overanalyzes everything even when it’s clear that the red curtains are just red”.

The comments, however, only made my disappointment worse.

The video was attempting to argue that anyone who finds the ultra-performative forced enthusiasm that’s de rigeur on TikTok & similar short-video platforms is doing so from a place of cruelty (hence the whole “death of empathy” thing). While there is some truth in this, especially when it’s clearly a bunch of people harassing a teenager who’s just doing what everyone around them is doing, the host also lumped in topics that aren’t really related, from bad video thumbnails to lolcow commentary culture to basically anything that isn’t positivity & encouragement towards the supposed targets. This led the commentators to start in on several well-beaten drums, from “lolcow is a right wing dogwhistle” to “they’re only picking on neurodivergent and/or queer people for being different” to “anyone who criticizes these enthusiastic kids is just a bully”.

Yeah, no. Tante Mela has been online longer than some of you have existed, and lemme tell you, it’s not that clean cut, no matter how much you wanna will it to be.

Let’s start with the assumptions about WHO gets “targeted” for discussion as a lolcow. You get into the weeds of the scene, and you’ll realize “it’s just a bunch of horrible bigots targeting poor innocent queer/ND kids for being quirky” isn’t true. In cases where it COULD be true, it’s usually because there’s a very superficial reading of the situation happening. Usually, regardless of any disability or identity in play, the people involved are objectively awful people. They’ve scammed people even more vulnerable than they (supposedly) are, or they’ve faked their disabilities to either get away with actual crimes or self-promote. They’ve been callous & cruel to people at their lowest, then expect sympathy when they do something really REALLY shitty. When there’s someone who IS almost universally hated, the “lolcow culture is right-wing only” crowd will usually hate them for the most trivial reasons versus why others do, such as hating someone for bad fandom takes rather than being an admitted remorseless child molester. Hell, some of them tie into what I was saying last week about not knowing when to keep their horny fuel to themselves, going so far as to fake killing themselves to get pity instead of just dialing back the constant fetish posting. (BTW, I am avoiding names with my examples, but I do have them available if asked.)

Honestly, I think this video put it best: sometimes what looks like 'bullying' is simply a form of social correction that the subjects just don't want to accept. Even if it’s “maybe dial down the forced overenthusiasm cuz it’s obnoxious & off-putting”, something your parent might have told you as a kid to keep you from becoming an object of curiosity/mockery, they’ll read it as an insult to their very core. And when you respond & keep fighting it, even if you’re “fighting” it by trying to deflect & join in with it against someone else, THAT’S when the cycle starts. People blow off “don’t feel the trolls”, but it WORKS. There are people who were laughingstocks for years who just… didn’t respond & kept on doing what they do, so long as it wasn’t awful, and they stopped being targets for mockery.

(Also, I’m saving it for Ace Week, but acting like the ONLY people who do identity-based dogpiles and harassment campaigns are imageboard dudes is the most disingenuous “it’s okay when WE do it” bullshit after 2018-2019 I’ve seen, and I will have some choice words for that.)

Taking this back to the video and its whole “have some ~empathy~ for the people you’re picking on” basis, I think we need to talk about what it is that you actually want. Cuz “empathy” has become a term like “narcissist” or “gaslighting” - a perfectly cromulent psychological term describing a very particular thing that has been embraced & overused by the internet to the point that it’s lost all meaning or usefulness. Empathy is understanding how someone else feels; that’s a perfectly good thing, but it’s not what people who use the word as a bludgeon want. They want SYMPATHY. They want people to feel bad for them and let them keep doing whatever it is that they’re doing, whether it’s being overly goofy & dancing about something they just bought or getting off on pretending they’re an infant in questionable Discords. And it’s entirely cuz sympathy is easier to abuse when you keep masking it as “empathy”. 

Funny how the same people who love to misuse psych terms will also bust out, like this video did, the whole “you’re reading too much into it, sometimes the curtains are just red” anti-intellectualism arguments, too. You don’t want to actually understand the words you use as cudgels against criticism, and you’re not even trying to hide it.

Finally, we need to talk about TikTok. Trying to paint the resurgence of “cringe culture” as reactionary without addressing the role the micro-video platform & its competitors have had in that is like addressing a flood without acknowledging the week of heavy rain that preceded it. EVERYTHING is exaggerated to the point of ridiculousness on that platform, and as a result, people who use that platform as their primary social window wind up with a very warped worldview. Every pastime boils down to a contest of who can purchase the most, every book promoted is either based on how “spicy” it is or how pretty its limited-edition printing is, every social issue is boiled down to pithy bits of glib text to be pointed at while overly produced pop music plays, and every private beef becomes a chance for public spectacle. It’s brought back rampant hostility to anyone even slightly overweight, Bi/Pan/Ace Discourse in all its horrid glory, and an alarming tendency to call every single person you find slightly off-putting a “groomer” based on “vibes” from 90-second clips. Basically, it’s made everything about an already dreadful world worse and just seems to be accelerating societal decline. But no one wants to acknowledge it. Either they see TikTok as some great leveler, giving “everyone” a voice & a chance to earn money (usually via shilling for drop-shipped garbage or bad mobile games), and anyone pointing out the platform’s far more numerous & dangerous flaws is a Bad Person; or they get so addicted to it that they’ll passively consume whatever it throws at them in any spare moment, as I have seen with coworkers & older relatives. Ignoring that all of this stems from this particular spout, as the video did, put it on an already shaky platform.

I don’t know how to wrap this up except that the whole thing feels symptomatic of the current internet’s refusal to engage with anything with a sense of nuance. And if you can’t accept nuance, you won’t be able to function in public for too long. The curtains are never “just” red, no matter how much you want to insist that they are.

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This week’s video recommendation is about Eurovision and how they really really REALLY need to remove Israel, or at least acknowledge their abuses of the “soft power” system that the show uses, before the contest implodes out of deliberate ignorance.

I normally don’t follow Eurovision. The most I know about it are that one band that won that dressed like zombies & sang heavy metal with opera arias in the chorus, along with that one episode of Father Ted that’s become a too-complicated-to-explain family in-joke. But I am a sucker for a good shitshow, especially if it’s completely avoidable. And this one is nothing but avoidable moments, from the “it’s okay when they do it” exceptions constantly being made for Israel, to the ignorance of their behind-the-scenes efforts to paint all criticism in bad faith or harassing reporters, to just not giving that one line in the opening number a second revision to find another rhyme for “neutral”.

Part of me, the deeply buried idealist, wants to believe that there’s value in “soft diplomacy” efforts like this or the Olympics. But as long as I’ve lived, they’ve just been another pissing ground, and any common ground quickly gets carved up by the powers that be. It feels like every effort to create some sort of way to connect across cultural barriers by embracing commonalities, things like music or athletics that every part of the world enjoys in some manner, will inevitably become tainted from its ideals and become yet another battleground. When you keep seeing it happen, it’s really only natural to be jaded. I’ll be shocked if the Eurovision board actually changes anything, even with other prominent countries declaring an “it’s us or them” ultimatum. They seem to embrace the ignorance of it all. After all, if they didn’t, they wouldn’t have declared as much in their musical number.

Lastly, before we move along, I’m not sure if I want to know what that woman in the horrible 90s-arcade-carpet blazer was on for the clips seen in the video. But I guess being on horse hallucinogens or whatever is the only way to get anyone into that outfit.

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Lighting-squared round! A more authentic expression of nervous tics than you’ll see on TikTok.

• Finally finished playing through the 2nd part of Scene 0 in Magia Exedra, and… hoo boy, thanks for reminding me how incredibly smackable Sayaka could be. Also, Mabayu is way too relatable for me on a personal level. And knowing that she probably doesn’t have a happy ending cuz of course not, it’s gonna sting even more.
• Also, props to Magia Exedra for finally doing a fully original new story with all-new characters! Sumire & Fuka both look VERY cool!
• Yep, the animation scene is already being insanely obnoxious about the newest indie darling. I knew it was gonna appeal to the very worst kind of animation fans cuz of who’s behind it, but they’ve done a speedrun of “terrible fandom nonsense” with only a single pilot available.
• Replace "Return of the Anasazi" & "Spectre of the Pine Barrens" with "Thoughtscape" & "The Robot Spies", and that's pretty much my list as well“Pine Barrens” isn’t bad, per se, but I’m personally very finicky about my Jersey Devil stories. At least the ending makes it clear that Big JD is actually out there and isn’t just a Scooby hoax.
• When Knit Picks said that their mystery boxes shipped with their “Traverse Cabled Accessories” booklet, I was expecting a pamphlet with 3 or 4 patterns. I was not expecting a whole-ass pattern book with 13 patterns, one with each mystery box.
• Tale Foundry, y’all gotta stop equating “romantic love” with “truest definition of humanity”. 
• Horse-girl game update: Hmm… need a Long race specialist for my team, so I’ll make this character my next career… oh. Oh no. OH NO. At least they made her boobs less cartoonishly huge compared to her concept art, but the rest of her story? Yeesh… (I do like her roomie, though. Short, angry, ineffective Napoleonic little gremlin? Man, I hope she’s playable soon.)
• Judging by the people who are still posting snide attempts to defend the knitting video, it appears that the audience for SciShow consists equally of dudes from 4chan who only post in English to defend sexism & Tumblr aesthetic blog girlies who grew up into something skirting tradwives. Also lazy, lazy teachers who apparently want their students to be as proudly smugly stupid as a Green brother. At this point, anyone defending Hank needs to be visited by a version of Coily who can force them to appreciate the existence of textiles.

Do what you gotta do, Coily, even if it means involuntary nudity. It's the only way they'll learn.

• Still thinking about Scene 0. Sayaka is definitely someone who’d unironically share that “why Gravity Falls is more mature than Breaking Bad” infographic because of the “teaches good morals” entry.

• So in the States, Discord is used for constant drama & highly questionable roleplay, while in other countries, it’s used to overthrow a deeply corrupt tyranny & hold actual elections. Okay.

• I think there are better selling points for Nebula than blurring out a dead body with an “uncensored on Nebula” label over it. But given how half the people they consider draws for that platform are folks that I find kinda smackable, I’m obviously not the market.

• Not surprised it’s taken this freaking long for DC to do an actual cross-promotion with AEW, since WBD is notoriously bad with cross-promoting its stuff effectively. Hopefully it goes better than their last attempt, even if the terrible art used for that did perfectly capture Britt Baker’s ugliness.

• I still wanna see more AEW folks on Food Network shows (especially if they’re ones I actually like and not, say, the greasy cowboy). It’s a shame they let the House of Black crumble, cuz putting them on something like Supermarket Stakeout would have been priceless. Malachi Black: “Hello. How much did you pay for your grocer-” Random suburbanite: “TAKE IT, OH GOD, JUST TAKE IT! DON’T HURT ME!”

• One day, I’ll have to sort out my thoughts on AEW, really. I don’t really bother with them anymore for a LOT of reasons, but I also don’t want them to fail cuz there’s lots of individuals worth supporting there & monopolies suck. But it also gets into some personal stuff & how AEW/its fanbase kinda caused my first true PTSD flashback, so it’s not gonna be easy. Although, if my former moots were any indicator, that somehow didn’t matter as much as the powerful acting chops & oh-so-sincere wholesome posting (*coughsarcasmcough*) of the greasy cowboy, so I doubt anyone will care even if I do.

• My most Old Person music opinion is that a lot of songs have really good disco-esque melodies that I would enjoy if every single singer didn’t sound like they had a horrible sinus infection. They’re all so… nasal. 

• Watching this video on performative men who play at being "feminist" within fiber arts circles and thinking about examples from within my own orbits… including one who I know from experience vanity searches to make sure that every teen/YA comic reader knows that his white male ass is God’s gift to ending sexism & racism and that anyone who’s even slightly put off by his arrogance or his extremely narrow concept of “female empowerment” (as seen in his absolute mangling of a magical girl series to fit into it) is a Bad Person. (He’s also an “own voices” ace writer - demi to be precise - that tends to center every single other fucking identity BUT asexuality in his work, and when he finally did, it was the same tired old Ace 101 shit that every single YA story does. Wow, way to portray the richness of the a-spec life experience there, bro.) But yeah, I seem to be one of the very few people online who can see through these guys and how they’re ultimately trying to make everything about them in some way. An actual male feminist shouldn’t feel the need to perpetually advertise it, only to… be it.

• Every visit I have to take to 30th Street Station is more depressing than the last. There’s always more mazes of wood & scaffolding, more of its beauty stripped away indefinitely, more of the station itself boarded off with only a newsstand & a Dunkin to distract you. I’ve been in dead malls less dismal. Not even the ceiling is being spared

Careful, now, you can still see some color and a sliver of natural light. Can’t be having THAT! Get more scaffolding!

Hmmm… I think I found a possible influence on why the renovation requires shutting down 75% of the station’s rest areas…

• I have no idea why my last post got a sudden surge of Chinese readers. If they were looking for the freaky stuff I was addressing, uh… sorry to disappoint. 

• Heard a car driving by on the street whose music had a “lalalala lalalala” piece, and for some reason, my brain interpreted it as the Meow Mix jingle.

• Nemalki uses his Thoughtnami blog to work out some interesting network revamps or “what-ifs”, the latest of which is Project MTV, a revamp & revitalization of the network that defined what was "cool" for us younger Gen X/older Millennial types. 

• I will forever appreciate & respect a creator who is humble & self-effacing about themselves & their work, as they're letting it speak for itself, than someone who is convinced that they're God's Chosen Creator & cultivated that image of themselves & their creations at every public opportunity. For a good example of why, look up a certain former Vertigo writer & what he used that illusion to cover.

• Saw concept art for an unmade H-B adaptation of Dial H for Hero (the Chris King & Vicki Grant version) with gorgeous Alex Toth art, and I was struck by two things, besides its beauty: One, while it’s sad that this wasn’t made in some ways, a show about two kid heroes would have been SAVAGED by the Adult Swim dudebros come the 2000s. Two, it’s probably a good thing that they didn’t adapt it, cuz at the same time in the comics, we had Chris becoming super OP & Vicki becoming an eeeeeevil monster because… she was gang-raped by a cult. Yeah… DC has always had this problem.

• Speaking of Vicki Grant, I’m kinda glad that modern readers don’t shrug off the sheer volumes of “weird issues with women” shit in Wolfman’s NTT. It was off-putting as fuck when I first read it 20 years ago, and while it’s taken way too long, having other people finally call out shit like Vicki’s weird victim-blaming story (or Terra’s in a similar way) or the mere existence of Terry Long is very welcomed. Claremont had some occasional weird shit, but it rarely reached this level of casual grossness.

• Annnnd now my stupid rat brain is thinking “magical girl Dial H”. I hate you sometimes, niche interest.

• I wish there was a way to just block specific topics from showing up on YT, even from channels you follow. Cuz there’s a long list of stuff that I just don’t care about, even actively dislike, and when YT keeps shoving it in your face cuz the people who like them REALLY like them & make the algorithm assume that applies to everyone, it’s extremely annoying. I don’t care about Dana’s tantrum show, I don’t care about the circus show thing, I don’t care about the UT sequel & its horrible child fans, I don’t care about That Show, I don’t care about a whole list of internet-beloved animated shows, I don’t care about anything with Batman. Just let me block them BY NAME, not by “extremely broad category that might contain them”.

• Oh, Andrade re-signed with AEW? Hmm. I give him a year.

• “It’s not that deep… unless it’s something that I like, in which case, it’s deeper than your feeble hater brain could EVER fathom, despite everything in the actual material!”

• Horse-girl update: Dammit, I’m not gonna get El Condor Pasa’s cool event costume (which actually looks like really cool wrestling gear & suits her better than her default gear) before the event ends, am I?

• I can’t be the only person who finds it hard to support a cause when the other people supporting it are just the most off-putting, obnoxious, “dear God, do you have NOTHING else in your life” assholes. Even if it’s a good cause, if that’s the vocal crowd pushing for it, I get to the point where I stop supporting it cuz I know the only thing worse than their proselytizing is that they inevitably become examples of “sore winners” when they get their way. And if you're reading this and think it could only possibly refer to your political enemies… oh, honey, you’re probably exactly who I’m talking about with this.

• I missed the Wraith Arc in the manga mostly for money reasons, but man, I loved its Magia Exedra adaptation. It’s made me hope (probably in vain) even harder for Walpurgisnacht Rising to knock some sense back into Homura. Again.

• Looking at the same people who stumped for Gretchen & her Holocaust denialism (among other vile shit she said that they described as “good politics”) reacting in disgust at similar attitudes in a famously hateful webcomic is another example of the “it's okay when WE do it” attitude I despise so much.

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Well, that’s another week done & dusted. This week’s cat picture is of Parker and his ingenious technique to stop me from going into the office.

Buddy, I can’t smuggle you onto the NJ Transit train in that. Besides, you’d hate it more than you hate car rides.

See you next week! Or not. I’m not your boss.

Sunday Sampler: Inside Thoughts Edition

Sunday Samplers are a “lightning round” of different subjects, none of which really warrant a full post, that have popped into my head over the course of the past week. They may or may not be regular weekly posts.

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Originally, this had been a series of reactions in the lightning-squared round, but I decided to delete those and ruminate a little further cuz I think it’s worth discussing. It has me thinking about two related questions over & over for the past week.

What compels people to share every aspect of their lives online, especially the stuff that basic decorum would suggest that you should keep private? Also, how do you react when you learn something so image-damaging about someone you considered decent that you can’t fathom they’d have sunk so low?

Let’s tackle the second question first, because it’ll make a good segway into the first one. Y’see, in the past few months, a former social media mutual had been posting more & more stuff that’s obviously destined for their spank bank. At first it was pinup photos or art, nothing too bad, and when it was fetish-y, it was pretty standard issue. But little by little, it got… weirder. It’s one thing to have a jones for fat people, but when the photos are all staged in ways where they look like headless beings of infinite stomach, it’s a little disquieting. And it seemed that roughly half of what they were sharing was wank material. It was annoying in that it should have been marked NSFW but usually wasn’t, but it wasn’t anything obviously objectionable.

Until… the diaper bondage playtime couple pic. A twenty-something sapphic couple where one is lustily looking at the other as she’s wearing an oversized diaper, a weird combo baby-sweater-slash-straitjacket, & a pacifier that’s large enough to be a gag. The staging, post text, & expressions make it clear that this is foreplay.

Now… look. I generally don’t kinkshame. You do you, so long as everyone involved in doing it is agreeing to it. But diaper & infant stuff is crossing a line, because when you try to figure out the appeal, everything is horrible. The least vile thing is “we’re so broken internally that we wish to return to an age when we were literally unaware of the world around us”, which I just find kinda tragic. How you can take that level of misery and turn it into a kink is… confusing. But the other interpretations? Okay, best of the worst case scenarios, you just like stewing in your own waste for some reason; this puts in the same “ew gross, but whatever, just don’t involve me” category as any other kind of scat kink. But then there’s the roleplay aspect: WHY do you want to be an infant, or want your partner to be an infant, in an explicitly sexual situation? Either you’re the toddler who wants to get violated, or you want to violate a toddler. I fail to see any kind of healthy, non-horrifying interpretation of this situation.

Needless to say, this has stained every single thing I see of this person & their posting. I used to be able to look at them and see a creative, frequently insightful person. Now? I see a gooner without decorum, someone who fits the odious conservative narration of escalating turn-ons due to overexposure, until you get something that’s psychosis at best & sublimated p*do tendencies at worst. The pictures of fat people without faces? Cuz you don’t want to think of them as people, only as bellies attached to bits. The near-constant protests against the shitty payment processor censorship efforts? Less for the sake of free speech/creative expression and more cuz you don’t want the tap turned off for your increasingly alarming wank fuel. Even looking back, before the payment processors started censoring anything with “fantasy” in the description, you can see where they went from being pretty normal to “sex is the only & ultimate definition of one’s humanity”. As a sex-neutral aroace, you can imagine how I feel about that kind of sentiment. It’s really stung to see someone you thought was a smart, interesting person and realize that they’re, for lack of a better term, fucked up from terminal porn brain.

And in the midst of this experience, I had another thought. When, exactly, did it become acceptable to make sure everyone online knows about your sex life?

We aren’t talking about queerness or identity, because despite what people might think, queerness informs more than just your sex life. It informs your view of the larger culture and what society does or doesn’t prioritize (i.e. gender roles, monogamy, procreation, hierarchy of social bonds, that kind of fun stuff). We’re talking about “here’s what I like to masturbate to, I view it as being as foundational to my worldview as any religion or philosophy”. We’re talking the kind of stuff that, should you start shouting about or showing off in a public venue like a train station or the middle of a Costco, you would get alarmed looks at best & kicked out at worst.

Like, the internet is a public place. This was understood for years, and it was assumed that, should you want to talk about your “me time” fantasies with others, you would do so at a place expressly dedicated to that. But with the advent of social media, suddenly this concept that some things should be silo’d away from your public persona kinda evaporated. Suddenly people decided that everyone needed to know that they’re turned on by balloons popping or have fantasies about taking a cheese grater to their or something else’s junk, and this would be right next to stuff about their everyday lives. Some places eventually created a culture of “don’t post anything that might get you fired if your boss saw it”, but that’s about it.

I’m not saying that people shouldn’t post about these things, but I AM saying that they should apply some “public space” rules that they’d use for in-person behavior. You wouldn’t be walking randomly around a Walmart and then start shouting “man, I really wish I could get vored right now”, provided that you didn’t have some sort of disability that hindered that level of situational awareness. (No, an ASD diagnosis from Dr. Buzzfeed Quiz doesn’t count.) You wouldn’t be shocked if someone got a public reputation as a freak if they decided to wear their puppy play gear (with… strategically located zippers) every time they went out grocery shopping. 

Yet, online you’re expected to… just roll with it. That there’s something wrong with you if you don’t want to be inundated with other people’s personal kinks. If you so much as ask for things to be marked “adult content” or NSFW so you can not have it show up on your screen while you’re working, that’s treated as no different than the censorship efforts. And if you look at someone wishing they could pretend to do unspeakable things to a toddler with a dirty diaper with anything but enthusiastic support, you’re basically a Puritan. You almost start to understand the whole “we’ve gone too far” rhetoric, because some people really don’t know or want to learn when something just shouldn’t be shared with the world.

It’s just a frustrating situation. It seems that my ex-moot has decided to embody every single scare-mongering situation regarding obsessive horniness (from escalating kinks to “omg u prudes” reactions to others’ understandable requests to tag their NSFW as such), and their shares make it clear that explaining to them that they’re not helping their case against actual objectionable censorship with their behavior is just gonna be talking to a wall. I just wish that people would re-learn the concept of decorum online, since all of this could have been avoided if ex-moot & several other people had kept their “naughty nursery” nonsense to themselves. But they didn’t, and now I can’t look at them without thinking so much less of them.

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Video recommendation time: on “shut-down” phrases and how it’s helped kill any kind of creative or critical thought.

“If we encourage people to keep their mouths shut and smile when they don’t like something, we end up creating echo chambers where no complex discussions exist around the art being put out.” I FEEL that quote in my bone marrow.

The domino tip to me doing this and cutting back on social media was such a reaction. The art in question, itself, on its own introductory path as designed by its creators & insisted by its acolytes, was something that I straight up did not like. Hell, I HATED it. It went beyond “dated” humor into being outright offensive, and its dominant tone was that of spite & condescension. But apparently, by NOT watching the series in full multiple times after loathing what I had seen of it, by NOT considering apologies on Reddit for the offensive content enough to negate their continued & constantly excused presence, and by NOT ignoring the fact that its audience/creative team/financial backers have used it as a cudgel against other works & those that make/like them, I am too “fandom brained” to have any opinion on this “perfect masterpiece”. Even though I tried to give it the benefit of the doubt, even though every “clever” joke I see from it is cringe-inducingly juvenile and/or mean-spirited, even though I apparently can’t enjoy something that I actually like without y’all insisting that this is better so no one should want to bother with it again. (You can probably guess what it is if you’ve been paying attention.) It was the absolute nadir of “let people enjoy things” twisted into “enjoyment of these things is mandatory and any other reaction will be punished”.

But that’s not the first time. From adored-by-Tumblr comic writers on Twitter who vanity search & QT’d me so their fans could “correct” my statements (in one case, that the work itself was hard to connect to cuz the “strong female role model” lead was so very obnoxious), to web artists who will happily let their bestie be their personal attack dog & harass people who so much as vague post about them (with no one knowing it was the vague posting subject until they showed up), to just random fans who cannot form any sense of identity or self-image without attaching it to something that they passively consume, it’s EVERYWHERE. This attitude of “it’s not that deep” or “stop overthinking it” or “let people enjoy things” or “only Bad People would object to this work due to its theme” has done more to further erode any sense of curiosity and engagement with a work deeper than “I agree with this very obviously multiple-stated moral” or “I like this couple” than anything else. It’s been snowballing, too, thanks to sites like TikTok basically feeding on the absolute dregs of humanity in every category. 

Is it any wonder, really, why so many people seem to be okay with AI slop? They already treat actual created-by-human-hands work as something that shouldn’t be talked about any deeper than “yay, I like that”. Whether they can’t or won’t articulate WHY they like it, or admit that there are things that they didn’t like, or just want to stymie critical discussion to feed their egos (Jeremy) or the egos of someone they’ve decided is their secret bestie, it all speaks of an eagerness to disengage with the humanity in any kind of creative work. Sometimes that means addressing the uglier sides of that humanity, be it ignorance or arrogance or outright nastiness. It’s just… too much for most people to handle. So if you’re unable & unwilling to engage with the human-ness of art, why not just cut that out entirely and get exactly the kind of Extruded Creative-Flavored Product that you want without having to think?

It’s truly a sad time if you like to think. Like, at all. And I don’t see it getting better any time soon. I WISH I could, but I feel like the correction point has long since passed.

(Also, largely unrelated, but if the creators of That Show mentioned above were still actively making it today, they’d never apologize for the homophobic & transmisogynistic stuff like they did, cuz it wasn’t so much that they realized it was wrong to include it but that the fanbase zeitgeist told them it was, so THAT’S why they apologized. Now, they’d probably just be full mask off, which would probably be better, since you’d have significantly less people trying to defend them & their gilded shit like you have now. Every time it’s brought up, this is my first thought, because it’s exactly what would happen. Like I said, part of acknowledging the humanity in a work is acknowledging that humans frequently are shitty & opportunistic.)

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Lighting-squared round! Cuz the alternative is shouting this nonsense at strangers.

• God help me, I really like that new Linkin Park song. It’s very Val-coded.

• Speaking of Val & her story, I swear I’m still working on it. I’m stuck in a setup chunk of the story that I keep scrapping cuz it steers into infodumping more than I’d like.

• I keep seeing things rightfully decrying how dull & monotonous design has become, from brand logos to car colors to architecture. But there never seems to be any further pushback other than the complaints. Not sure what can be done, though, since every single food place deciding to look like a bank branch isn’t something that you can force a quick change from unless it’s caught early and all boycotts do is give the people doing them another reason to be smug shits about optional purchases.

• Kinda weird that I’ve had 3 different YT channels being sponsored by 3 different mattress companies in the past week. One of which was talking about people who claim to have had sex with ghosts, so at least it’s on-theme.

• Lostwave is the gift that keeps on giving. I am dying to learn more about who made “The Fall of the King”.

• The answer to every video with a title like “Why Did The Internet Fall Out of Love With (insert celebrity name here)” is always “they didn’t share every single minute political position as their most vocal online fans”. Doesn’t matter what those particular politics are, that’s always the reason.

• Tale Foundry is a channel that I have an increasingly love-hate relationship with, given that their insightful & interesting videos will be followed up with blithe praise of scumbag creators (Neil, JKR, that kind of “fair for the 2000s but now revealed to be a complete cretin” figure, and of course Ellison) and/or casual callousness (one on the “otherworldly power” of romance was both ignorant about aromanticism & weirdly rapey with its examples). The latest one I’ve seen, basically encouraging maladaptive daydreaming because it works out so well in fiction, is a good example of the latter category. It’s also showing how limited their reference pool is, since if you’ve read even the manga version of Umineko, you’d see a great example of why maladaptive daydreaming isn’t gonna help you or fix your problems in the end; yet let’s make sure we all reference the grown-ass people who face-plant while sprinting into a train station wall cuz they just really really want to see if Hogwarts is real as something cute & quirky. God, imagine how different that scene would have played out with the Tale Foundry approach: “I pray that you live as a human, so that you never need to become a witch.” “Yeah, but the witches are soooo cool!” “Did… did you miss the part that we’re all miserable and born from overwhelming sorrow and using this fantasy as an easy escape?” “Yeah, but… magic! And cool clothes!”

• Wild that widely embraced quackery is how I learn that Tylenol & its generics are largely unique to North America.

• It’s so disappointing when a YT video makes a really good point about a niche subject… but opts to use obvious ugly AI “art” for its visuals when stock images would have been easier & less hideous.

• I omitted it in the part with the video recommendation, but I feel part of the whole “don’t think too much” trend is the whole “choose joy/focus on the positive” thing that I’ve seen online. Even with people that I can tell mean well & are trying to be genuinely optimistic, it takes on strong Helen A vibes. It’s so constant & so accidentally vapid that I can’t help but mentally respond “get bent” every time I see it. The only person I ever found who would come off as genuine saying it was Jim Henson, and y’all aren’t Jim Henson.

• If you got the previous reference, hi. I, too, am old and extremely nerdy.

“Happiness will prevail! And stop doomscrolling!”

• Knit Picks, why did you list off which yarns are gonna be in my mystery bags when the entire point of mystery bags is that you have no idea what you’re getting until you physically get it? I like what I’m getting, but that kinda misses the point of the practice.

• The latest example of “this creator is so ~wholesome~ & family friendly and OOPS, they were just outed for doing something heinous” is only furthering my distrust of anyone who cultivates that very particularly online version of “wholesomeness”, since it’s so very easy to fake and is almost always covering for something terrible.

• Related: There really is no more accurately named social media platform than Discord, because it certainly seems to sow it.

• Everything about K-Pop Demon Hunters looks great, but it’s the whole “you’ll have to listen to k-pop” thing that’s stopping me. Look, I know I have jacked-up music taste (I listen to a good chunk of future funk & eurobeat), but I just can’t get into that genre. It’s a little too Extruded Music-Type Product for me, and it especially suffers from that “songs written based on popularity algorithm” trend with its actual composition. I appreciate the harmonizing of the singers & the choreography, but it’s just… not for me.

• I like to think that the Rapture actually did happen, but the only creature on the entirety of Earth that qualified was one random squirrel, so we all just thought it hadn’t happened.

• Horse-girl game update: Yay, I unlocked Gold Ship’s 3-star form… SWEET BABY JESUS, WHO GAVE THAT MANIAC A WEAPON FOR HER SPECIAL?! She’s gonna do Scorpion moves mid-race!

• [checks online fandom venue] [sees only discussion is about shipping because of fucking course it is] [sees a discussion about something called a “zaddy”]

NOPE

• Seriously, though, have I mentioned how much I hate that shipping has taken over any & all fandom discussions, to the point that creators cater to it deliberately & make it worse? I’d rather have outrage grifters than shipping, cuz at least they’re talking about something deeper than “who do I want to see making out”.

• Related: I saw someone sulking about how Umineko isn’t worthwhile to them because there’s “too many official couples”, so there’s no room for them to string together ships. Oh no, the writer actually cares about making the characters fleshed out enough that their relationships matter & you can’t project your fantasies onto them! Clearly this means that the work is horrible and should never be read or enjoyed by anyone! (/sarcasm)

“Alright, which one of you decided to ship me with GOHDA…?”

• Oh FFS, they're trying to ban legal pot AGAIN?! Even my mom has discovered that CBD is good for her chronic pain and is cool with it! Turning it back now will go over about as well as Prohibition.

• Me: “Man, nothing's sadder than a YTer who simps for BetterHelp.” Lady My Parents’ Age With A Yarnwork Channel: “Hold my subscription box full of stolen patterns & factory reject skeins…”

• I hold no illusions of my writing being the most engrossing & artful prose ever, but I do feel like my refusal to indulge in and/or vocal distaste of shipping & (ugh, gag, shudder, wince) spice probably makes it easier for modern audiences to ignore. Oh well.

• Moon Channel is looking at the current kerfuffle over Nintendo's new patents, the flaws in the popular reporting, and how they're most likely to be applied. Long story short, it’s hopefully not as bad as people are saying due to historical precedent. (Also, that Honkai pet game looks kinda fun.)

• Gotta love when you follow something focused on one of your favorite characters (I refuse to say “comfort character” on principle but they’d probably qualify), and the first thing you see is a bad homophobic/biphobic herpes joke with them from a garbage show that people treat like a holy book. And by “love”, I mean “hate so much it justifies drinking on a weeknight”.

• The sheer volume of online aces using the pushback on payment processor censorship as an excuse to go full pick-me and somehow blame the mere existence of any of us who just don't care for or about smut for it is gonna make my Ace Week entry extremely salty. I'm talking Bret Hart levels of salt. 

• And on top of that, Ace Discourse in all its hideous glory is making a comeback, specifically the “you're not ace, you're just (insert dismissal here)” variety. I guess people need an easy target cuz it's less work or risk than fighting actual problems just like it was back in 2018-2019, and it's well documented that the online ace community will never do shit in response except whine about being valid.

• Horse-girl game update 2: King Halo’s mom is the WORST. 

• Apparently a whole big chunk of the smaller online yarn stores that I like are all owned by the same “investment firm”. To say I am concerned is an understatement. STOP TRYING TO TAKE AWAY MY YARN, VULTURE CAPITALISTS!

• Juvenile & spiteful to do it, but I low-key hope that the two indie animators who are both terminally online get in a cold war over whose pilot/series becomes the topic that overwhelms all animation discussions like kudzu, thus driving away everyone but their most parasocial fans. Whether it happens or not, I'll be avoiding both to rewatch Punch Punch Forever.

—

That’s all for this week. Instead of a cat picture, I’m including the picture of a remorseless thief who decided to start my weekend by stealing & destroying my prescription sunglasses because she was mad I was helping Mom cook instead of paying attention to her.

She doesn’t regret what she did, only that she got caught. BRAT!

See you all next week!